The target market for proprietary SourceForge extensions is tiny. The market for SourceForge at all, even the free version, above and beyond plain CVS is small as it stands.
Right! I just don't get it. Ever heard of an FTP server behind a firewall? Why bother with a slow, buggy geek solution when you can just get to the data?
Just checked, and VA stock is already down over 5% today. What I find hilarious is that they have lost, in one quarter, 400% of the share price, which keeps falling. As an investor myself, this is the worst possible time to buy the stock. It could take years for it to get back up over $5.
I can't figure out why companies insist on spending every last dollar when its obvious that it isn't going to happen.
I think the problem with a lot of these tech boom-bust companies is their explosive growth, not in market valuation, but in infrastructure. They worked parts of their business just fine, but they spent too much on hiring too many employees and leases on space. They all told us it was a "new economy", but they fell victim to old economy bloat. Now that profits are dry, they can't respond. Smaller companies, or companies which have multiple business segments with smaller staff levels in each (like Microsoft) seem to be able to react and produce much better than one trick ponies with six layers of management.
It's on the way, but as I suggest in my post a few minutes ago, it may already be here. The big problem with having people select what gets posted from behind the scenes is the obvious bias. You can see that now, since all this bad news is coming out regarding VA, but Slash just pretends it's all roses.
I think Kuro5hin has a MUCH better solution: People submit stuff, and the whole user base votes on it to decide if it's posted or not. At least then, you can hope to eliminate the kind of bias I point out in my post.
Slash will probably never be closed source, but with this kind of editorialization, it might as well be.
I posted this news item last night, but the release at the time had only mentioned the losses VA has racked up instead of servers. They reported 2.9B, but now they have updated it:
update: VA Linux Systems, once one of the flagships of the open-source software world, will rely on sales of proprietary software in the future, the company said today as it reported a $290 million loss for the most recent quarter - Cnet
What angers me is that my submission was roundly rejected by Slash, but today they allowed a post of the updated release which focused on the pie-in-the-sky prospect of selling SourceForge Enterprise. I bet if IBM, or some other competitor of VA had such a loss, the post would not have been rejected! You know, when I started posting on Slash, I thought it was a circle jerk; now it's obvious.
I've been quite happy with my Telocity connection via BellSouth lines. I have really liked the static IP and full allowances for servers and multiple 'puters. I've also not noticed any changes related to the DirecTV merger, except a couple of email notices and site redesign. I had good technical service from BellSouth as well, before I moved to Telocity, but didn't like the rotating IP's.
There are a lot of people having problems with their DSL provider, but I get the feeling that there's a larger number of us who have really had no problems and just remain quiet.
This problem is not new, it is only gotten worse over the last decade. Here's a short timeline which reveals my biases.
1990-96: If you wanted to do graphics, you bought a Mac and paid the premium for the proprietary hardware. If you did anything else, you generally didn't bother with a computer at all, or got an inexpensive x86. The problems then were having to pay two or three times the cost of the x86 'puter for a specialized machine.
1996-2000: If you wanted to do graphics, and you didn't already have a Mac, you could buy an x86 'puter and run anything you cared to name; Quark, Illustrator, Photoshop, Fractal, etc. If you had other tasks to do, you already had the x86 with a popular office suite and other stuff. The problem then was in deciding whether to pay up to four times more for a fashion statement or get the x86 and move on with your life. If you wanted to run a server, you could choose between many flavours of Unix/Linux to get the job done, and if you had an older x86 laying around, you could build the server with little or no money. Sure, you might in the process contribute to the M$ bank, but you got your work done using all the "standard" graphics and office formats.
2001-future: Now, that OSX is out, the decision of whether to buy a Mac is even more difficult to justify. Since more and more of the productivity software has been ported to the Mac, and more and more of the graphics software has been ported to x86, the choice to buy a new Mac running two separtate OSes (OS9 & OSX) and pay dearly to run them on proprietary hardware doesn't make any sense at all, unless one gets the iMac for a student. But OSX is a server, running a BSD variant, they say. So if you want to run a server, and since servers have become so much more critical in the last couple of years, then the choice to, again, pay up to four times the x86 cost for hardware and run, really an unproven variant, which would otherwise be a free download of BSD, is a particularly poor choice. One can, again, run the x86 'puter with one or many free OSes or use a semi-commercial product (like Solaris or Redhat) which can be installed again and again and again, and is configured for the x86. Parts are interchangeble and upgrades are much cheaper. So, a setup like Slashdot's "Matrix" would be even more outlandisly priced than the overpriced VA hardware it currently uses (which must be provided for promotional reasons, I'm sure - paying VA those premium prices is dumb).
So, the Mac vs x86 decision has never been harder. But don't get me wrong: Personally, I use Redhat (and my dot-com sits on an ISP's Solaris system) for server operations, and a single Win98 box for graphics, running the programs mentioned above and many more. The reason I went with Win32 is detailed in the 96-00 section above, which is when I started my business. I would absolutely love to get off the Windblows and onto an Apple, or a Wine enabled Redhat box. The problem with the former is still the cost of that proprietary hardware, and the problem with the latter is the lack of full operability with all Win32 programs.
Perhaps all of this is a massive sell-out in the eyes of Mac Zealots, but I could argue that for one to stick to Apple for all PC and server operations is another kind of sellout, one which requires blind obedience to a single company's vision of the future, whether that vision is clear, or in this case, quite blurry. Give me a real alternative to Win32 and I'd be out of Windoze before you can say 'reboot', but a real alternative does not mean trading a proprietary operating system costing $89 for proprietary hardware and upgrades which could cost thousands. If OSX, or some version of it, ran clean on x86 architecture and also allowed me, through a version of Wine, to keep my existing multitude of graphics applications without repurchasing them for the Mac, then I'd be onto an Apple this afternoon. I do not agree with those who say an embrace of x86 by Apple would be Apple's doom: I firmly believe it would be one of the best decisions Apple could make. After all, OSX IS a BSD variant, and BSD is an x86 OS, so making all the GUI stuff run should not be a big problem, in general theory.
So, as it stands, we all have to choose which proprietary setup we wish to support: Microsoft and Intel, or Apple and Motorola. To choose one and claim only the other is proprietary is unrealistic, for they both are. There are SO many disaffected Windows users out here who would seriously consider running OSX, if only the above problems could be solved. The company to solve them is, guess who, Apple. That's the kind of "innovation" we really need.
I found Redhat (6.2) a very good start, but I could only compare it to Solaris (8), which was much more difficult at first. I wanted to run them both, but Solaris had one small incompatibility with the NIC's I'm using, so I went with Redhat all the way.
Coming from Win32 and Mac background, the thing I can underscore to you about Unix/Linux is that you have complete control over the system. This is also why it is difficult at first. Go ahead and use a GUI at first (I like KDE) to get a feel for where things are and to ease your transition. Especially learn how to turn services off which are not needed. What's cool is that you won't have to reboot with every change. Then, after a while, you can lose the GUI and leave the system running at the command line, something you cannot do with NT/2k. The system will be much faster, you'll notice, and you'll eventually learn all the commands you need to admin things.
All in all, if you have an open mind about leaving your NT world, you will very much like using Unix/Linux, no matter what distro you start with. Just don't let yourself get too frustrated in the beginning, because it really is a different world.
As a former user of one of those 64k's, like on the IBM intro page linked, it's great to recall just how far we've come. Those early PC's were little more than electronic typewriters to me, a writer, while now PC's can do just about anything one cares to do.
The legal opinion and other comments are touching on the problem of sharing copyright protected material or information which is not accompanied by the owner's release.
P2P technology itself has almost nothing to do with this, because the problem also applies to those who plagarize or share content using cassette tapes. Nobody has ever seriously suggested banning tapes or hard drives or CD-[W]R's, or photocopiers, which are all equally powerful technologies of infringement: The reason napter got into trouble was due to it's blatant promotion of infringment itself and the cheerful knowledge of it, not because of it's software or it's servers.
Re:Apache infected by Code Red!
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm, even if you do that, you'll still have the junk in your logs, and that huge query string with the XX's or NN's is still going to be a part of the URL request.
I thought of simply redirecting the request to M$ - I mean, it's their freakin' problem, right? - I've had about 50 hits to this default.ida just in the last two days from the main dotcom site which is linked via a single href to a DSL backend, along with neighbors in my DSL range, 64. But, then I've done that kinda thing before and it doesn't change a damn thing, and I still have to look at that junk in my logs. It only changes the log entry from a 404 to a 302, wow.
It's like when someone links to an image you host and won't let go: Even though you redirect it and rename the image, you STILL have to see that 302'ed request in the logs...(There oughta be a law!)[[ and on that note, I've had a two year fight with a certain Geocities/Yahoo webmaster who WILL NOT stop linking to an image, even though it has been a broken link on their site for over a year!! WTF?? ]]
BTW, are you SURE Apache can be infected by Code Red???, 'cause I really don't think that's accurate..
sick of the log entries
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 1
Don't know about you, but I'm sick of looking at this crud in my logs. Unfortunately, trying to redirect, rewrite or otherwise filter the request, along with the "vti" hack from FrontPage, just produces either the same log entry with a 302 in place of a 404, or a double entry with the request and the redirect.
Makes me want a stripped down filter box to grab those requests and not log them. How many terabytes of wasted disk space is going to be devoted to M$ hacks in rotating logs??
Aside from the very legitimate problems of reading e-books and publishing e-books, there is a much more depressing aspect of all this: The fact that more and more authors are getting drowned out by the industry and the mass consumerism which every consumer hates, yet buys anyway.
If you don't believe me, do some searching for small publishers who have less than stellar resources. There are nearly none left since the publishing industry gelled into three or four conglomerates posing as separate "houses". This is relevant because it is the small publishing efforts which have traditionally brought us the content which was between.05 and 180 degrees off of mainstream. Nearly all the groundbreaking books were self-published before big business took over in the middle of this century. Nowadays, a self-published book isn't treated like a "real" book at all, while self-mastered e-books get even less exposure.
There are thousands of us authors out here, myself included, who will not likely ever get in front of your eyes because we do not have the money to do mass advertising, and our e-book efforts are ignored. The reason this matters is because nearly all of the content/entertainment you consume is recycled or technical.
So, I wonder where the author has gone in all of this, because the big publishers sure aren't interested, and those of us who've gone it alone are nearly universally ostricized. How is good content going to surface in the 21st century without giving it away on a website?? To bring this back on topic, if e-books are not an outlet for innovative authors, and since the publishers are less and less interested in risk, what are we to do?? It's not just a question of making money off of the work, but of the work ever being seen in the first place.
I had looked at Telocity before they were swallowed up by DirecTV; do they still allow servers?
Yes they do. I've been with Telocity for over a year and they allow anything, plus they automatically provide a real, static IP. I do not believe the merger with DirecTV has had any effect on this, except that they may be more concerned with outgoing bandwidth, but only if you're running a high traffic service.
I use the line for test servers, an intranet site, and application demos and it's not been a problem...
My question is to the ownership problem which arises from this.
What is it which distinguishes software from other forms of creative or intellectual expression? If you recognize an author as owner in one setting, why not in another?
Good point, that my right to produce proprietary software will not be taken away simply because a few, such as yourself, think that proprietary software is "wrong". The chances of repealing the laws protecting copyrights and patents are infinitely slim.
What I find mystifying from you is that very notion of "wrong". When you buy a DVD, or a CD, or a book, you are in fact purchasing a right to unlimited personal use of someone else's intellectual property: You are not simply paying for the media costs and given a right to copy or redistribute that work. There is absolutely no reason to think of software otherwise, as it is an intellectual endeavour just as a book or a song. Just because one or two companies are getting rich from their software is no valid reason to jettison the rational, legal, and moral grounds for considering intellectual creation as the property of the owner.
If you are a writer or creator of some type of work falling under this rubric, I find it troubling and unnatural that you would think of your own work in this light. If you are not such a creator, then it makes sense that you think others should subsidize your entertainment.
Slashdot Mirror
The target market for proprietary SourceForge extensions is tiny. The market for SourceForge at all, even the free version, above and beyond plain CVS is small as it stands.
Right! I just don't get it. Ever heard of an FTP server behind a firewall? Why bother with a slow, buggy geek solution when you can just get to the data?
Just checked, and VA stock is already down over 5% today. What I find hilarious is that they have lost, in one quarter, 400% of the share price, which keeps falling. As an investor myself, this is the worst possible time to buy the stock. It could take years for it to get back up over $5.
I can't figure out why companies insist on spending every last dollar when its obvious that it isn't going to happen.
I think the problem with a lot of these tech boom-bust companies is their explosive growth, not in market valuation, but in infrastructure. They worked parts of their business just fine, but they spent too much on hiring too many employees and leases on space. They all told us it was a "new economy", but they fell victim to old economy bloat. Now that profits are dry, they can't respond. Smaller companies, or companies which have multiple business segments with smaller staff levels in each (like Microsoft) seem to be able to react and produce much better than one trick ponies with six layers of management.
Ha! :)
It's on the way, but as I suggest in my post a few minutes ago, it may already be here. The big problem with having people select what gets posted from behind the scenes is the obvious bias. You can see that now, since all this bad news is coming out regarding VA, but Slash just pretends it's all roses.
I think Kuro5hin has a MUCH better solution: People submit stuff, and the whole user base votes on it to decide if it's posted or not. At least then, you can hope to eliminate the kind of bias I point out in my post.
Slash will probably never be closed source, but with this kind of editorialization, it might as well be.
What angers me is that my submission was roundly rejected by Slash, but today they allowed a post of the updated release which focused on the pie-in-the-sky prospect of selling SourceForge Enterprise. I bet if IBM, or some other competitor of VA had such a loss, the post would not have been rejected! You know, when I started posting on Slash, I thought it was a circle jerk; now it's obvious.
I hate to post a "me too!" comment, but, me too!
I've been quite happy with my Telocity connection via BellSouth lines. I have really liked the static IP and full allowances for servers and multiple 'puters. I've also not noticed any changes related to the DirecTV merger, except a couple of email notices and site redesign. I had good technical service from BellSouth as well, before I moved to Telocity, but didn't like the rotating IP's.
There are a lot of people having problems with their DSL provider, but I get the feeling that there's a larger number of us who have really had no problems and just remain quiet.
This problem is not new, it is only gotten worse over the last decade. Here's a short timeline which reveals my biases.
1990-96: If you wanted to do graphics, you bought a Mac and paid the premium for the proprietary hardware. If you did anything else, you generally didn't bother with a computer at all, or got an inexpensive x86. The problems then were having to pay two or three times the cost of the x86 'puter for a specialized machine.
1996-2000: If you wanted to do graphics, and you didn't already have a Mac, you could buy an x86 'puter and run anything you cared to name; Quark, Illustrator, Photoshop, Fractal, etc. If you had other tasks to do, you already had the x86 with a popular office suite and other stuff. The problem then was in deciding whether to pay up to four times more for a fashion statement or get the x86 and move on with your life. If you wanted to run a server, you could choose between many flavours of Unix/Linux to get the job done, and if you had an older x86 laying around, you could build the server with little or no money. Sure, you might in the process contribute to the M$ bank, but you got your work done using all the "standard" graphics and office formats.
2001-future: Now, that OSX is out, the decision of whether to buy a Mac is even more difficult to justify. Since more and more of the productivity software has been ported to the Mac, and more and more of the graphics software has been ported to x86, the choice to buy a new Mac running two separtate OSes (OS9 & OSX) and pay dearly to run them on proprietary hardware doesn't make any sense at all, unless one gets the iMac for a student. But OSX is a server, running a BSD variant, they say. So if you want to run a server, and since servers have become so much more critical in the last couple of years, then the choice to, again, pay up to four times the x86 cost for hardware and run, really an unproven variant, which would otherwise be a free download of BSD, is a particularly poor choice. One can, again, run the x86 'puter with one or many free OSes or use a semi-commercial product (like Solaris or Redhat) which can be installed again and again and again, and is configured for the x86. Parts are interchangeble and upgrades are much cheaper. So, a setup like Slashdot's "Matrix" would be even more outlandisly priced than the overpriced VA hardware it currently uses (which must be provided for promotional reasons, I'm sure - paying VA those premium prices is dumb).
So, the Mac vs x86 decision has never been harder. But don't get me wrong: Personally, I use Redhat (and my dot-com sits on an ISP's Solaris system) for server operations, and a single Win98 box for graphics, running the programs mentioned above and many more. The reason I went with Win32 is detailed in the 96-00 section above, which is when I started my business. I would absolutely love to get off the Windblows and onto an Apple, or a Wine enabled Redhat box. The problem with the former is still the cost of that proprietary hardware, and the problem with the latter is the lack of full operability with all Win32 programs.
Perhaps all of this is a massive sell-out in the eyes of Mac Zealots, but I could argue that for one to stick to Apple for all PC and server operations is another kind of sellout, one which requires blind obedience to a single company's vision of the future, whether that vision is clear, or in this case, quite blurry. Give me a real alternative to Win32 and I'd be out of Windoze before you can say 'reboot', but a real alternative does not mean trading a proprietary operating system costing $89 for proprietary hardware and upgrades which could cost thousands. If OSX, or some version of it, ran clean on x86 architecture and also allowed me, through a version of Wine, to keep my existing multitude of graphics applications without repurchasing them for the Mac, then I'd be onto an Apple this afternoon. I do not agree with those who say an embrace of x86 by Apple would be Apple's doom: I firmly believe it would be one of the best decisions Apple could make. After all, OSX IS a BSD variant, and BSD is an x86 OS, so making all the GUI stuff run should not be a big problem, in general theory.
So, as it stands, we all have to choose which proprietary setup we wish to support: Microsoft and Intel, or Apple and Motorola. To choose one and claim only the other is proprietary is unrealistic, for they both are. There are SO many disaffected Windows users out here who would seriously consider running OSX, if only the above problems could be solved. The company to solve them is, guess who, Apple. That's the kind of "innovation" we really need.
I found Redhat (6.2) a very good start, but I could only compare it to Solaris (8), which was much more difficult at first. I wanted to run them both, but Solaris had one small incompatibility with the NIC's I'm using, so I went with Redhat all the way.
:)
Coming from Win32 and Mac background, the thing I can underscore to you about Unix/Linux is that you have complete control over the system. This is also why it is difficult at first. Go ahead and use a GUI at first (I like KDE) to get a feel for where things are and to ease your transition. Especially learn how to turn services off which are not needed. What's cool is that you won't have to reboot with every change. Then, after a while, you can lose the GUI and leave the system running at the command line, something you cannot do with NT/2k. The system will be much faster, you'll notice, and you'll eventually learn all the commands you need to admin things.
All in all, if you have an open mind about leaving your NT world, you will very much like using Unix/Linux, no matter what distro you start with. Just don't let yourself get too frustrated in the beginning, because it really is a different world.
I, for one, wish you well
As a former user of one of those 64k's, like on the IBM intro page linked, it's great to recall just how far we've come. Those early PC's were little more than electronic typewriters to me, a writer, while now PC's can do just about anything one cares to do.
Ain't it cool??
The legal opinion and other comments are touching on the problem of sharing copyright protected material or information which is not accompanied by the owner's release.
P2P technology itself has almost nothing to do with this, because the problem also applies to those who plagarize or share content using cassette tapes. Nobody has ever seriously suggested banning tapes or hard drives or CD-[W]R's, or photocopiers, which are all equally powerful technologies of infringement: The reason napter got into trouble was due to it's blatant promotion of infringment itself and the cheerful knowledge of it, not because of it's software or it's servers.
Hmmm, even if you do that, you'll still have the junk in your logs, and that huge query string with the XX's or NN's is still going to be a part of the URL request.
I thought of simply redirecting the request to M$ - I mean, it's their freakin' problem, right? - I've had about 50 hits to this default.ida just in the last two days from the main dotcom site which is linked via a single href to a DSL backend, along with neighbors in my DSL range, 64. But, then I've done that kinda thing before and it doesn't change a damn thing, and I still have to look at that junk in my logs. It only changes the log entry from a 404 to a 302, wow.
It's like when someone links to an image you host and won't let go: Even though you redirect it and rename the image, you STILL have to see that 302'ed request in the logs...(There oughta be a law!)[[ and on that note, I've had a two year fight with a certain Geocities/Yahoo webmaster who WILL NOT stop linking to an image, even though it has been a broken link on their site for over a year!! WTF?? ]]
BTW, are you SURE Apache can be infected by Code Red???, 'cause I really don't think that's accurate..
Don't know about you, but I'm sick of looking at this crud in my logs. Unfortunately, trying to redirect, rewrite or otherwise filter the request, along with the "vti" hack from FrontPage, just produces either the same log entry with a 302 in place of a 404, or a double entry with the request and the redirect.
Makes me want a stripped down filter box to grab those requests and not log them. How many terabytes of wasted disk space is going to be devoted to M$ hacks in rotating logs??
Aside from the very legitimate problems of reading e-books and publishing e-books, there is a much more depressing aspect of all this: The fact that more and more authors are getting drowned out by the industry and the mass consumerism which every consumer hates, yet buys anyway.
.05 and 180 degrees off of mainstream. Nearly all the groundbreaking books were self-published before big business took over in the middle of this century. Nowadays, a self-published book isn't treated like a "real" book at all, while self-mastered e-books get even less exposure.
If you don't believe me, do some searching for small publishers who have less than stellar resources. There are nearly none left since the publishing industry gelled into three or four conglomerates posing as separate "houses". This is relevant because it is the small publishing efforts which have traditionally brought us the content which was between
There are thousands of us authors out here, myself included, who will not likely ever get in front of your eyes because we do not have the money to do mass advertising, and our e-book efforts are ignored. The reason this matters is because nearly all of the content/entertainment you consume is recycled or technical.
So, I wonder where the author has gone in all of this, because the big publishers sure aren't interested, and those of us who've gone it alone are nearly universally ostricized. How is good content going to surface in the 21st century without giving it away on a website?? To bring this back on topic, if e-books are not an outlet for innovative authors, and since the publishers are less and less interested in risk, what are we to do?? It's not just a question of making money off of the work, but of the work ever being seen in the first place.
I had looked at Telocity before they were swallowed up by DirecTV; do they still allow servers?
Yes they do. I've been with Telocity for over a year and they allow anything, plus they automatically provide a real, static IP. I do not believe the merger with DirecTV has had any effect on this, except that they may be more concerned with outgoing bandwidth, but only if you're running a high traffic service.
I use the line for test servers, an intranet site, and application demos and it's not been a problem...
My question is to the ownership problem which arises from this.
What is it which distinguishes software from other forms of creative or intellectual expression? If you recognize an author as owner in one setting, why not in another?
Hi again - (had to get some sleep)
Good point, that my right to produce proprietary software will not be taken away simply because a few, such as yourself, think that proprietary software is "wrong". The chances of repealing the laws protecting copyrights and patents are infinitely slim.
What I find mystifying from you is that very notion of "wrong". When you buy a DVD, or a CD, or a book, you are in fact purchasing a right to unlimited personal use of someone else's intellectual property: You are not simply paying for the media costs and given a right to copy or redistribute that work. There is absolutely no reason to think of software otherwise, as it is an intellectual endeavour just as a book or a song. Just because one or two companies are getting rich from their software is no valid reason to jettison the rational, legal, and moral grounds for considering intellectual creation as the property of the owner.
If you are a writer or creator of some type of work falling under this rubric, I find it troubling and unnatural that you would think of your own work in this light. If you are not such a creator, then it makes sense that you think others should subsidize your entertainment.
(no longer an Anonymous Coward)